Thursday, July 05, 2007

Bowing to the Inevitable

I like heal. I like to melee. Hence I rolled a paladin.

It seemed so simple back then. But now, if I go Holy, I heal but I never melee. If I go Retribution or Protection, I melee but never heal. I've spent the last few months bouncing from spec to spec, trying to find something that captured a happy medium.

That medium does not exist anymore. So I need to choose: heal, tank, or dps?

The plain truth is that I am not willing to put in the effort to get the gear required to make Protection or Retribution good enough. I'm still crushable in my tanking set, despite it being half epics. My Retribution gear is terrible, and I'm doing as much damage as the tanks (though, admittedly, that's because I can't stop myself from throwing heals).

And I'm not willing to run instance after instance to get the gear necessary to bring these two specs up to the level of an average tank or dps.

Quite honestly, I'm a liability to my guild when I am Protection or Retribution. They won't care that much, but I care. So I've respecced back to Holy (my preferred 47/14/0), and I'm planning on staying Holy unless significant changes are made to Protection/Retribution.

Ah well. Healing is boring, but it's necessary, and I'm pretty good at it. On the plus side, I completed my set of T4 Gloves (I have all 3 different T4 Gloves), so I have 2/5 Holy T4 now.

9 comments:

You can spec hybrid by do a mix between holy and retribution (for example by spending 25ish points in both trees).

But you then will be a medicore healer and a medicore melee - this commonly not accepted by groups because they see this as waste of a spot.

This is (of course) not the truth because a well played paladin will make a wipe nearly impossible and can make a bad group working and a medium group superior but unfortunately he is doing this with a few heals here and there and by off tanking mobs or protecting the healer - these actions are not recognized very well (because damage meters have only absolute values and can't honor the correct action at the correct time. So maybe you put out low damage but you do this by protecting the healer from death or you heal to get the main healer the time to toss out the life saving big heal on the tank or you heal the healer so that he can proceed to heal the tank and so on. All these actions will put you on the lowest healing/damaging rank but these action will precent a wipe).

Currently there is no room for playing a hybrid when not being a druid (even Shamans get the same problem).

This will not change because the average knowlege in PUGs is low and in guilds they all thinking "min/max" which leaves nearly no room for hybrids.

If you like this playstyle (hybrid) than you will need to find some friends who will group with you. This will work for the 5man content.

My experience is that if you spec holy and protection (41/20/0), then you can heal extremely well, and if you go for +spelldamage instead of +heal gear you can tank 5-man instances. I am currently doing this. I do not think that the damage you put out will be enough to do DPS, but you will have few mana inssues, and you'll have JoR and Holy shock for burst damage.

welcome to the dark side!lol j/kBeing a hybrid class myself I believe things will get easier for you once your guild gets to the 25 man content. In the 10 man stuff theres just no room for hybrids until your group gets decked out and learns the encounters.

I personally want to heal with my shammy but thats because i played a dps only rogue for 2 years and wanted a change when BC came out.

Back in MC and BWL 40 mans we didnt care what spec people where. you just needed 30 good players and 10 warm bodies. Larger raids=more flexibility for hybrids that want to do both.

Im in the same position, kinda burned out with the game to a certain point. I havent touched a BG by myself since I got my pvp belt,boots,gloves because the place makes me wanna puke.(I still go in if theres a guild group doing EoTS or w/e).I haven't touched an instance since I got revered with Sha'tar for my Xi'ris charm. I am more or less in the best gear I can get pre-heroics and even then its only a few MINOR upgrades.

My resort has been mostly Kara and 5v5, and with Kara going down the drain (conflicting guild policies/no attendance) and PvP becoming almost as ridiculous as it was at 60...leveling my paladin and making him my main is becoming more and more of a likely possibility.

Honestly, don't worry too much about spec, play the spec you want to play, healing spec helps but so does a ton of good healing gear. A Prot/Ret paladin with a tiny handful of points in Holy can be as good as any Holy paladin if they have the gear. The game comes down to gear, etc. in the end. Just don't get discouraged and play the game how you prefer even if it's not optimal. Look at the guy who did straight up Hunter Melee to 70 never even firing a single bullet or arrow. Have fun the way you prefer, spec how you want, do what you want.

Your awesome blog was linked on wowinsider so I began to look through old posts and darn this post depressed me to hell. I am currently 40 points into Prot and confused as what to do next. A respec to Holy at 70 seems like my only choice to be Raid-worthy but if I really wanted to be a Healbot I would have rolled a Priest.